HOME PAGE

Monday, February 25, 2013

Kentucky and the 13th Amendment

As reported in the Lexington Herald-Leader, by Greg Kocher, "Kentucky supported Lincoln's efforts to abolish slavery — 111 years late," on 23 February 2013 -- Here's an OMG fact for you: The Kentucky legislature didn't go on record against slavery until 1976 — 111 years after the 13th Amendment prohibiting involuntary servitude became the law of the land.

Lincoln, with 12 nominations at Sunday's Academy Awards ceremony, tells of the president's struggle to have Congress pass the amendment.

What isn't told is that Kentucky, Lincoln's birthplace, refused to ratify the amendment. Mississippi was another; more on that later.

The movie depicts only the first step of the process to add an amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Moviegoers see passage of the amendment in the House of Representatives in 1865. But the amendment's story didn't end there.

Before an amendment can be added to the U.S. Constitution, three-fourths of the states must pass or ratify it. That process wasn't finished and verified until December 1865, eight months after Lincoln's assassination.

To understand why Kentucky rejected ratification, some context is necessary.

Slavery had existed in Kentucky since before it achieved statehood in 1792. In 1790, slaves were a little more than 6 percent of the population. By 1830, they were 24 percent of the population. By 1860, the year before the start of the Civil War, Kentucky had 225,000 slaves; most lived in the Bluegrass region and in the corridor between Lexington and Louisville.

Kentucky's first constitution, written in 1792, protected the right to own slaves. Slave labor was used to grow hemp in the 1800s, and tobacco in the central and western regions of the state. By 1850, 28 percent of white families owned slaves, but the average slaveholder owned five slaves or fewer.

At the start of the Civil War, Lincoln had hoped to encourage border states like Kentucky to take the initiative in abolishing slavery themselves, according to historians Lowell Harrison and James Klotter. Lincoln tried several times to get Kentucky to adopt a plan of compensated emancipation. It would work like this: If a state committed itself to a definite date to end slavery, then Lincoln would recommend to Congress that owners receive $400 for each slave. The plan didn't fly.

When Lincoln decided that ending slavery would help win the war, he declared slaves free only in those areas controlled by the Confederacy. His Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 did not affect Kentucky. Even so, the proclamation attracted protest in the Bluegrass.

"Most Kentuckians supported the Union with the understanding that a state had the right to deal with slavery as a matter of state's rights," wrote James Ramage, a professor of history at Northern Kentucky University, in an email. "When President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, most Kentucky Unionists felt betrayed and declared that they would never accept freeing the slaves."

Kentucky Gov. James F. Robinson denounced the Emancipation Proclamation in his message to the legislature in early January 1863. The legislature also denounced the proclamation "as unwise, unconstitutional and void," and there was talk in the state of recalling Kentucky troops from the Union army. Some even advocated that Kentucky secede from the Union.

Such talk embarrassed those who supported emancipation. Samuel Lusk wrote to a friend on Feb. 4, 1863: "If the president is resolved on going to hell and destroying the best government on earth, let him place himself under the control of Kentucky politicians and he will soon have accomplished his purpose."

Meanwhile, the feds were doing little to win the hearts and minds of many Kentuckians. Federal troops resorted to abrasive measures that were illegal or unconstitutional to maintain military control of the state. This included military interference with elections, such as prohibiting "disloyal" persons from voting.

By 1864, the Union army's ill treatment of civilians and Lincoln's inclusion of black freedom as a war aim "caused many formerly loyal Kentuckians to turn their sympathies against the federal government," writes Anne E. Marshall in Creating a Confederate Kentucky: The Lost Cause and Civil War Memory in a Border State.

Among those opposing federal policies was Brutus Clay, a U.S. congressman from Bourbon County, who was steadfastly against abolition and the enlistment of slaves into the Union army. (Brutus was brother to Cassius Marcellus Clay, who argued for emancipation and published an anti-slavery newspaper, The Lexington True American.)

During the debate on the 13th Amendment, Brutus Clay said: "If you take away from a man that which he considers to be justly his own, you make him desperate, and he will retaliate upon you. You can never by oppression make a man obey willingly the laws of his country. Act justly toward him, let him see he has a government which will protect him and he will love that government. But oppress and rob him, and he will despise and hate you."

Without Clay's vote, the 13th Amendment passed the U.S. House of Representatives in January 1865 — the climatic finale in Steven Spielberg's movie. The next month, the Kentucky legislature voted to reject it: 56-18 in the House and 23-10 in the Senate.

Slavery was still legal and visible in the commonwealth in 1865. One visitor traveling through the South that year noted that Louisville was the only place on the trip where slaves waited on him.

Nevertheless, the 13th Amendment was ratified by the necessary three-fourths majority of states and was officially adopted in December 1865. Kentucky, meanwhile, came to identify itself more with the Confederacy after the war than it did during the war. Between 1867 and 1894, Kentucky elected six governors who had been Confederates or Confederate sympathizers.

Kentucky did not move to ratify the 13th Amendment until state Rep. Mae Street Kidd, D-Louisville, one of three blacks then in the Kentucky legislature, filed a resolution to do so in 1976.

The resolution passed the Kentucky House by a 77-0 vote, and it passed the Kentucky Senate by a voice vote on March 18, 1976. The vote was symbolic — Kentucky's ratification wasn't needed for the amendment to be added to the U.S. Constitution — but it was a symbol with power.

Now, back to Mississippi. The Magnolia State ratified the 13th Amendment on March 16, 1995, but because the ratification document was never presented to the U.S. archivist, it was never considered official.

On Jan. 30 of this year, Mississippi finally sent a copy of its 1995 resolution to adopt and pass the 13th Amendment to the Office of the Federal Register.

A week later, Federal Register Director Charles Barth confirmed that he had received the paperwork, the Clarion-Ledger newspaper of Jackson, Miss., reported.

"With this action, the state of Mississippi has ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," he wrote. (By Greg Kocher — gkocher1@herald-leader.com)

SLAVE WHIPPING AS A BUSINESS. Whipping was done at these markets, or trader's yards, all the time. People who lived in the city...

Capoeira

African Martial Arts of Brazil

About the Banjo by Tony Thomas

The banjo is a product of Africa. Africans transported to the Caribbean and Latin America were reported playing banjos in the 17th and 18th centuries, before any banjo was reported in the Americas. Africans in the US were the predominant players of this instrument until the 1840s.

Charleston Slave Tags and Slave Badges

Badge laws existed in several Southern cities, urban centers such as Mobile and New Orleans, Savannah and Norfolk; the practice of hiring out slaves was common in both the rural and urban South. But the only city known to have implemented a rigid and formal regulatory system is Charleston.

MANILLA: MONEY OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Manilla. Manillas were brass bracelet-shaped objects used by Europeans in trade with West Africa, from about the 16th century to the 1930s. They were made in Europe, perhaps based on an African original.Once Bristol entered the African trade, manillas were made locally for export to West Africa.

SLAVE CURRENCY: African Slave Trade Beads

In Africa, trade beads were used in West Africa by Europeans who got them from Venice, Holland, and Bohemia. They used millions of beads to trade with Africans for slaves, services, and goods such as palm oil, gold, and ivory. The trade with Africans was so vital that some of the beads were made specifically for Africans.

Slave Trade Currency: Cowry Shells

Long before our era the cowry shell was known as an instrument of payment and a symbol of wealth and power. This monetary usage continued until the 20th century. If we look a bit closer into these shells it is absolutely not astonishing that varieties as the cypraea moneta or cypraea annulus were beloved means of payments and eventually became in some cases huge competitors of metal currencies.

Bunce Island Slave Factory

Cannons with the Royal Crest

Adanggaman

Africans Making Slaves of Africans

Ota Benga The Man in the Bronx Zoo

Ota Benga (1883-1916) was an African Congolese Pygmy, who was put on display in the monkey house at the Bronx Zoo in New York in1906

Railroads and Slave Labor

North America's four major rail networks — Norfolk Southern, CSX, Union Pacific and Canadian National — all own lines that were built and operated with slave labor.

Sculptor Augusta Savage

"Lift every voice and sing" by Augusta Savage: New York World's Fair.

Afro-Uruguay Spirit of Resistance in Candombe

In the streets of Montevideo, Uruguay, Afro-Uruguayans celebrate an often-ignored part of their history - Candombe and resistance.

Tintin: Sinister Racist Propaganda

Tintin has been an inspiration for generations. But his status as a paragon of wholesome adventure is under threat, thanks to a court bid to ban one of his books, Tintin in the Congo, for its racist portrayal of Africans.

W.E.B. DuBois

"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." -- W.E.B. DuBois

Slave Tortures

Portugal Slave Trade

1501-1866 Portugal transported 5,848,265 people from Africa to the Americas.

French Slave Trade

1501-1866 France transported 1,381,404 Africans to America.

Great Britain Slave Trade

1501-1866 The British transported 3,259,440 Africans to the Americas.

Spain Slave Trade

1501-1866 Spain transported 1,061,524 Africans to the Americas

Denmark Slave Trade

1501-1866 Denmark transported 111,041 people from Africa.

United States Slave Trade

1501-1866 The USA transported 305,326 Africans to the Americas.

Netherlands Slave Trade

"To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?" — Marcus Tullius Cicero